


smile (everything will be fine)

by Tyleet



Series: nothing but the bones [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:31:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Tyleet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is a joke to you?" </p><p>"Sweetheart. There are werewolves running around in the world right now. Everything's a joke to me. How else do you think I stay sane?" </p><p>Kate Argent and the fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	smile (everything will be fine)

**Author's Note:**

> There's a bit that was stolen from Supernatural's "After School Special," because--I think Dean and Kate actually have a lot in common? The title is borrowed from a song that I heard as a teenager, but don't remember anything else about now. Also, I haven't read the prequel book, so if we're calling that canon then this is definitely AU. 
> 
> I feel like the archive warnings are a little nonspecific, here, so, a few extra warnings: implied minor character death, explicit sex with a fifteen year old, child abuse of the sort Chris and Gerard pulled on Allison in season two.

She's twenty-two years old on a hunt all her own. She's got a cheap sublet in a town at least five hundred miles away from the nearest hunter, a sawed-off shotgun in the dashboard of her car, and a potted aconite clipping growing in her bathroom. She's got an eye on her target, a brand new CD changer in her car, and a wary eye on the local law enforcement. She's happy.

*

She's ninety percent sure it's the Hales. Big old family, keep to themselves, been in the area for generations, every single one of them supernaturally beautiful--oh yeah. She's not wrong.

"You don't have any evidence linking you to the Hales," Chris tells her over the phone, frustrated.

"Another body cropped up last night," Kate replies, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Chris hates it when she answers the phone while driving. "A teenage girl, partially eaten in the woods. The police are saying it's a grizzly bear."

"So you find out what did it," Chris says, voice hard. "But you do it right. You can't take on an entire pack by yourself, not if they've gone feral."

"I'll cross all the Is and dot the Ts," she tells him, rolling her eyes. "And don't say that you can be here in a couple hours if I need you, because believe me, I got this."

He sighs. "Do you want to talk to Allison?"

She does.

*

She loves her niece like she loves nothing else except her father and the satisfaction she gets from ending a hunt. As soon as Chris passed her this tiny pink bundle, it was like her heart started shuffling things around and tossing things out to make enough room, and Kate's glad it did, because it means she can say things like "I'd die before letting anything hurt her," and mean it.

Allison is eight years old and the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, with soft black hair and a solemn little face that breaks apart into this enormous, goofy smile whenever Kate does something to make her laugh. Which is a lot.

It's almost enough to make spending time with her brother worth it.

*

Chris is a buzzkill, but then he always has been and what he doesn't know won't hurt him. She's read and reread the Code he loves so much, and it says quite plainly that men are weapons and women are generals, that men are too violent and emotional to make the hard calls the women can. She believes this, has believed it since the first time she saw Chris let an omega go just because it wasn't of legal drinking age yet. She knows better than her brother, knows how to make the tough calls, knows how to shake off the guilt that shadows her brother's eyes and enjoy wasting a couple monsters.

Chris believes they're doing something dirty, but necessary. Like exterminators, she thinks, rolling her eyes. She knows better. The job is a gift.

When she was fourteen, her first boyfriend broke up with her because she got angry and broke his ex-girlfriend's nose. Looking back, she's pretty sure she'd been scaring him for a while before that: he was the football captain and she was the tiny blonde transfer student who smirked at the horror films he took her out to, who did a triple flip out of her bedroom window to meet him on a night when Chris was watching her and said she couldn't go out. She must have seemed like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, peculiar and fierce, but less appealing in real life.

She tried to convince him that she hadn't meant to break Stacey's nose, she'd just let her temper get the better of her, and wouldn't he rather she just suck him off in the car and forget about it, but he wouldn't stop looking at her with this disgusted expression on his face.

"I was wrong about you, Argent," he'd said, voice loud in the school hallway, where people were still gathered after the fight. "I thought you might be pretty cool, underneath your freakish exterior. But I was wrong about you, huh? You're a freak right down to your bones."

She shot back something about how he hadn't cared about that last night, and maybe something else about how he had a small dick, and he'd laughed.

"You've got a great mouth, honey," and his voice had dripped condescension, "but it doesn't change the fact that you're a psychotic bitch. I feel sorry for you. Seriously."

He'd started walking away, and her heart had pounded so hard she could barely think, and before she knew it she was screaming that he didn't know anything about her, not a single fucking thing, that she saved lives. She was a hero, did he understand? A _hero._

They'd moved pretty soon after that, and at this point the only thing Kate really remembers about the guy is that he was wrong and she was right.

*

Derek Hale is an easy way in. He's young and pretty--the way they are--but he's also fiercely lonely, clearly out of place at school, fifteen and uncomfortable in his own skin. Probably just uncomfortable wearing a human skin, she amends.

Whatever the reason, he's the easiest to get on his own. He walks the same way home every day--and that alone is a clue, because what teenage boy is fine with walking ten miles into the woods after school?

She parks her car by the side of the road at the entrance to the Beacon Hills preserve, and casually lifts up her hood and loosens the car battery connection. Then she waits.

Ten minutes later, a teenage boy comes walking up the road.

As it turns out, he does know something about cars. She also finds out that he's soft-spoken, serious, but when she jokes about not being used to playing the damsel in distress, he grins, and his teeth are just uneven enough that it looks like he's got too many of them to fit in his mouth.

"Well aren't you just as sweet as can be," she says, and he actually blushes.

Yeah, she's got this.

*

Kate has a few simple truths about life and the job. First, it's better to laugh than deal with the alternative. Second, if you have to do it anyway, you might as well enjoy it.

*

When Kate was eleven years old, she and Chris were picking up burgers from a local diner when she went inside to use the bathroom. As soon as she came out of the stall, someone slammed her into the wall and threw a bag over her head, and when she screamed she felt the sharp prick of a knife at her neck and someone gruffly warned her not to do it again. She was lifted up bodily and dragged through something--probably the bathroom window--and the next thing she knew she was in the trunk of a car. When they picked her up again, she took the risk and started screaming at the top of her lungs, but that just meant she got manhandled more. When they finally took the bag off her head, she was tied to a chair in a dark concrete room--probably a basement, with a single bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling--and she couldn't stop shaking.

"And you're dead," her father told her gently, stepping into the light. She just made out the shape of Chris behind him, drawstring bag in his hands, face expressionless.

For some reason that made her laugh. Better than the alternative.

"Chris will be waiting for you outside," her father said, and dropped a knife at her feet.

Five hours later, Chris was leaning against the car. He saw her and applauded slowly. "Good job," he told her, and she flashed a grin at him.

*

She doesn't push her luck, at that first meeting. She waits two days, until she can plausibly bump into Derek at Starbucks and insist on buying her rescuer a mocha.

Derek isn't what you'd call handsome, even with his gorgeous pale skin and plush pink mouth. His hands, his ears, and his eyes are all just a little too big for his body, his hair and eyebrows are shockingly dark against that skin, and there are those sweet crooked teeth. He looks like an awkward teenage boy teetering right on the edge of becoming a beautiful adult, although probably none of the kids his age have seen it yet. She's willing to bet he hasn't been able to persuade a single girl to kiss that mouth, not yet.

She changes her body posture, leaning in, lowering her voice so he has to lean in, too, and lets her foot just brush the inside of his calf.

He tells her about how he loves baseball but nobody in this town cares about anything except lacrosse, about school, about how his favorite musician is actually Bela Fleck, and his ears actually redden when she tells him she's heard of the Flecktones.

"Not really my speed, though, sweetheart," she tells him, grinning slyly. "I like my music hard and fast." His eyes drift down to her mouth and stay there, and she casually licks her lips.

He tells her about his family, dragging his eyes up with an obvious effort. His family's huge. They all live in the same house, together. No, he doesn't feel crowded. He doesn't need much space. They don't get out much.

Kate tells him she knows about insular families, rolling her eyes, and tells him that her brother used to live with her and her dad, even after he got married and had a kid. Wasn't that weird?

He shrugs, and tells her that's kind of normal in his family. "I guess normal is the watchword, huh?" he says, and she laughs.

She learns that he's the only one in school, except for his older sister, who just started her first year at Stanford, and except for his younger sister, who does kindergarten in the mornings, but comes home by the afternoon.

"Tell me more," she says, and when he starts to frown she winks and adds, "about you."

*

The first thing her father taught her about werewolves was the most important thing.

"They may look human, Kate, but you have to remember. That werewolf over there, who watches movies, who plays football, who wants to convince you he's just as much a person as you? That isn't a human. That's the thing that killed him."

"They're like rabid dogs," Chris put in. "Once they've been infected, they need to be put down, before they lose control."

"And they will," her father said, heavily. "They always do."

She didn't think to ask him about the werewolves that were born, not made, until much later.

"That's an even sadder case," her father said. "They were never human to begin with, but they don't know any better. They don't have souls, you understand, like humans do. Even the ones we can't touch, the ones protected by the Code because they're too young, or haven't spilled human blood--you need to understand that they will, eventually. It's in their nature."

"They can't help it?" Kate asked.

"They can't," her father confirmed.

*

She gets a call from her contact at the Sheriff's department. They found the bear, blundering into someone's backyard, and shot it full of lead.

They found human remains in its stomach.

She calls Chris, and it goes straight to voicemail. "Hey, sunshine," she says, feigning disappointment, "you were right about me jumping the gun. Turns out it actually was a bear, this time. They found bits of the last victim in its digestive tract, and everything. I'm still pretty sure there is a pack around here, but it looks like they're minding the Code, so I'm gonna head out. Tonight. Wanna meet me back in Chicago on Monday? Tell Allison I'm dying to see her."

She hangs up. Dials another number.

"Hey, sweetie? I'm bored. Wanna come over and keep me company?"

*

She punches Derek's v-card on the ratty sofa in her sublet, kissing him breathless, mindless, his awkwardly large hands gripping onto her shoulders like he's afraid he'll fall if he lets go. She breaks the kiss and he gives an almost panicked gasp as she wrestles his shirt off.

He shudders as she licks her way down his abs, hands sliding under the waist of his jeans.

She keeps her eyes on his face as she sucks him off, waiting for it, waiting for it. She's not that patient. She uses a bit of teeth, and he whimpers. She pulls off, just a bit, and he makes a sound like a frustrated growl and fists a hand in her hair, pushing her back, and she laughs, flushed with victory closing in.

When he comes, it's with a broken gasp and a flash of shockingly blue eyes, his mouth opened wide and stunned so she can see his lengthening teeth, feel the claws pressed into her neck.

Almost before he's done coming, he's turning white and mortified, begging her not to tell, please, please, he swears he's not dangerous, he didn't think he would lose control, he just didn't expect--

She gathers him up in her arms and kisses him until he's quiet and hard again against her leg.

"I won't tell," she promises. "It's okay, sweetheart, it's okay, I won't tell."

Derek looks at her with hazel eyes soft with wonder, and she reminds herself that those teeth are designed for the rending of flesh, that those claws on her neck could have killed her, that even if he's soft and beautiful now, when he grows up he'll be a killer.

And then, because she's won, after all, she unzips her jeans and reaches into her back pocket for a condom. Kid shouldn't have to die a virgin, after all.

*

The night of Kate's seventeeth birthday, she went to a club and danced herself mindless and drank four shots of tequila and failed to be vigilant. She woke up handcuffed to a chair in a cabin, her father looking seriously down at her.

"You need to be more careful," he told her with genuine pain in his voice.

"I was out with my friends," she snapped. "It's my birthday. I'm allowed to have a life."

"You're not normal," her father said. "You need to be so much better than normal."

And the thing is, she knew--knows--he was right, so she didn't flinch when he told her she had fifteen minutes to get out before the smoke inhalation killed her, didn't flinch when he went outside and she could smell the gasoline, hear him striking the match and dropping it.

When she stumbled out fifteen minutes later, coughing so hard she can barely breathe, eyes streaming from the pain and the smoke, both her thumbs dislocated, her father grabbed her and hugged her hard, stroking his hand over her hair. "I'm so proud of you," he told her, and she was still coughing, shuddering against him. "You did so good, sweetheart. I'm so proud of you."

*

"Your eyes are too big for your face," she murmurs, as close to Derek Hale as two humans can be, and he averts them immediately. "It's okay," she assures him. "I like it." _My, what big eyes you have._

She proves it by kissing them shut, and Derek lets loose this sweet little sigh that would just about break her heart, if she didn't know what he was.

*

She gets things in order, and decides to do it in the afternoon. She tells herself it's more practical this way--no chance of anyone being out grabbing dinner, or unexpectedly picking Derek up from school. She decides it doesn't matter that Derek will survive. She can always come back, if she needs to.

It's a hard job, but it's worth it. She's never doubted that it's worth it. She's known since the first time she saved someone from a werewolf, actually saved this guy's life, and when the omega was dead and the police cars had shown up, he was hugging his wife, and he'd looked at her and said _thank you_ , thank you, god, thank you so much. She knows it's worth it with every body she finds, blue-lipped and pale with a single festering bite-mark in their sides. She's known it's worth it since the first time she felt Allison's tiny heart beat in her baby chest, and remembered there were monsters out there in the world.

"Showtime," she says to the hooker she's paying to be an arsonist on the other end of her phone. She hangs up, breathes in.

*

She hits the road in less than an hour, and she can just see the black smudge drifting up to the clouds above the Beacon Hills preserve. She rolls down her window, turns up the music. Reminds herself she needs to buy Allison a present before she gets to Chicago.

She catches her own gaze in the rearview mirror, pale and serious. Come on, smile, Kate, she tells herself. Why don't you smile more?

She drives away from the smoke.


End file.
